The violations involve the depot's emergency response, emergency action and emergency evacuation plans.

OSHA said the depot failed to conduct emergency drills, share emergency plans with employees and create a plan to keep track of them in an evacuation. The agency also said workers and supervisors didn't know an emergency plan existed.

The citations issued Wednesday do not involve the depot's storage operations for 523 tons of aging chemical weapons, but rather the functions on the rest of the site, OSHA area director Ron McGill said.

Still, "the workers feel that it's scary to be here without an appropriate emergency action plan," said William Scrivner, a depot safety specialist who is among those who raised concerns about emergency procedures.

The depot has conducted quarterly emergency drills but not for all workers, Easter said.

"Our planning has been for those who are most likely to be impacted by an event based on (wind) conditions on a day-to-day basis," Easter said. "Being able to move all of those people out of 15,000 acres and doing a head count was not exactly a priority. We'll fix that."

The depot, with as many as 1,200 employees, is a major supplier of ammunition to the Army and Air Force for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and is the prime supplier of chemical and biological defensive gear for the troops. It also stores and modifies various types of ammunition, and military helicopter modifications are carried out there by a private company.

Craig Williams, director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a citizens' watchdog organization based in Berea, said OSHA's findings were ironic considering that tens of millions of dollars have been spent outside the depot on training and public education about how to handle an emergency.

"And here you've got people in the closest proximity (to the chemical weapons) not even being told the basics of what to do in an emergency situation," he said. "That's irrational, and it's quite astonishing."

Easter said most of the depot's employees "are not anywhere close to the chemical weapons," adding that prevailing winds would push a possible chemical leak away from where most people work."

The whole complaint that went to OSHA was that there was not a significant effort on the installation to plan for and execute an evacuation drill, that there was not enough education and practice," he said. "We agree with that."

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Information from:Lexington Herald-Leader, http://www.kentucky.com and the Courier-Journal, http://www.courier-journal.com